https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...e-likely-obese/


Protein-truncating variants in BSN are associated with severe adult-onset obesity, type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-024-01694-x

Genes are often tendencies, not destiny. That's not nearly enough people to explain our current epidemic of metabolic derangement.

The author of Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food revealed that he has SIX genes which predispose him and his identical twin brother to overweight. By concentrating on food without all the additives, both he and his brother fixed their metabolic syndrome and achieved healthy weights.

They should be finding out who is gluten sensitive! Instead of letting everyone blame their genetics for their issues. Maybe some food tolerances should be established and recognized because it's also about the immune system.

And we know genes can get turned on and off. This is the kind of thing that makes people feel in the grip of fate, when they can do things about it.

The description of defective is perhaps not correct. The fat genes also would have been a survival bonus during lean times. Which characterizes the human history until the last 100 years of super agriculture.

It was absolutely necessary to have extra body fat to draw on during a famine.

I remember my mom talking about how it was not uncommon for a baby to not survive an illness (such as a stomach bug) if they didn't have a lot of extra fat to draw on. They apparently used to count the rings of fat on the baby's arms and legs to determine how healthy the baby was - the more rings of fat, the better.

This was indeed the story of my baby pictures in farm country.

But where oh where were these fat genes when I was young? I'm 74, so my childhood and teen years were the 1950s and 1960s. Yes, some people were a bit overweight, but I never saw the massively obese people that you see now.
I spent a lot of my 1950s years in England where my Dad was stationed with the Air Force. I remember British babies looking much chubbier than American babies, not sure why. Two of my best friends there were chubby babies but they grew out of it by the time I met them at 8 or 9 or so.
My father got overweight in his 60's. I'm not sure how much overweight he was, maybe 50 or 60 lbs. He was an Air Force navigator and sat in front of radar screens in the planes for who knows how many hours over his 25 years in the Air Force. He died of cancer at 73.
My mother was a farm girl and was very thin her entire life. Growing up we always ate fresh foods and my parents almost never bought any junk at all. She never got cancer, and died at 95. My grandmother was similar and died at 99.
The obesity you see now seems odd, but it must be due to the processed foods so many people eat. So many people don't appear to know how to cook using fresh ingredients, so they resort to all these horrible processed foods.

That's true - it's the whole push to eat grains and more grains, most of it processed into products that are barely even "food-like".

The article pointed out that it was a very rare gene:


That's probably equivalent to the extremely rare obese individual we'd see back in the 60's.

I remember exactly one girl in school who had a serious weight problem. She probably had that gene.

There were a few others who were various degrees of chubby compared to most. But there was no widespread obesity like there is now.

Their chubbiness probably had a lot to do with the junk food that was already available back then. Some had more access to junk food than others, and happened to be more sensitive to the carbs than others. Those are the ones who ended up chubby back then.

With UPFs so widespread and readily available now, it's no wonder we have so many who are overweight or obese.

My family must have the "fat gene". I'm the only person under 300 pounds, and I have to work at it.

My formula, fewer than 25 carbs per day, and twice as much fat as protein.

It does limit my diet, but I'd rather be healthy and live a longer life than indulge in foods that are going to adversely affect my health.

I'm sensitive to carbohydrate. Do I have the "fat gene"?

Since eating in my food environment put on so many extra pounds.

I'm extremely sensitive to carbohydrates too, but I doubt I have that gene.



From the way it was described, it sounds like the gene is so rare that it doesn't have anything at all to do with sensitivity to any particular type of food or macronutrient, just a tendency to not feel satiated after eating so that you're always hungry - which in a way does sound a LOT like the way I feel on carbs, but I reach satiety much more easily and don't get the feeling of hunger for several hours on LC. Eating a lot of carbs though, I might feel excessively full, but still ravenously hungry.

One would think that these people have tried going LC to see if it affects their weight and hunger. I mean surely they asked them if they've been on diets, what kind, and if they were successful in losing weight, or still hungry all the time. Because here's a hint - if there's a diet where you're not hungry all the time, it's going to be lower in carbs.

Surely they they asked such questions, right? (Yeah, I know... probably not, at least not in a way that clearly showed LC made any difference at all)

Then again... the ones who conducted this study probably started with the hypothesis that maybe it's a gene that causes obesity, let's see if there is one.

Still, the link to a specific gene causing obesity seems extremely low, since it's so rare compared to obesity itself - and that should be a very big clue that it's not the cause of obesity in general. And the people who have that gene are experiencing the exact same insatiable appetite as many without the gene.

And yet most people studied (obese or not) will eat similar macro-nutrient proportions because that's the proportions of macro-nutrients available in the stores and at restaurants. The naturally thin people we all know have never had to white knuckle it through a diet (but instead as Oprah put it "you aren't even thinking about food"). They're eating similar macro proportions, but they stop eating when satiated and are satiated for hours on end. So the reasoning would be that it can't be the macro-nutrient balance of the diet that's the problem, because we have lots of people who are eating a similar macro-nutrient balance but are not obese, even if they're becoming more rare. Ergo, the obese are just eating too much altogether.

So it goes back to WHY are they eating too much? It's been determined that obesity is not simply a moral failing, and has been declared to be a disease treatable with appetite controlling drugs (apparently the obese don't have enough GLP-1 in their systems, just like T2 diabetics don't have enough insulin, even though they're pumping out tons of it). So the hunt is on to figure out why they don't have enough GLP-1 to control their appetites... hence the reasoning that perhaps it's a gene that causes the problem.

Only problem with the results of this study is that only accounts for a very tiny percentage of those who are obese.

[Sarcasm]Maybe it's the macro-nutrient proportions? Nah, that's crazy talk! Everyone knows that we've determined the proper macro-nutrient proportions for an ideal diet! And you NEED at least 60% carbs! Keep those fats down below 25%! Protein? Well, if you really must... but make sure most (if not all) of them are plant based! [ /sarcasm]

This exact thinking took cancer research down the wrong path. Because you will find genes that way!

But after decades, they are starting to realize they are not finding answers. And prevention is cheaper than early detection. Much better all the way around.

I increasingly think not only food composition but also availability has something to do with it. For example, as a kid in the 1950s and 60s, there were just a few cereals available: corn flakes, Rice Krispies, grape nuts, a few others. Now you pass down the cereal aisle and I can't believe how many cereals there are, a great many of them sugared. Then there are the chips...I remember just potato chips and Fritos, not a lot else. Look at the chip aisle now...again, just as bad as the cereal aisle. And then there are the cookies, the candies, the list is long. Also consider the sizes of all these products. I remember when I was a student in France in 1974, the markets had tiny little bags of chips, nothing larger than the little individual serving chip bag size you see now. Cookie packages were small, with maybe 15 cookies in them. Cokes and sodas were SMALL, maybe 6 oz bottles. So the list is long. I read a study that mentioned if you were given a huge bag of popcorn, people tend to eat it, whereas they would have been satisfied with a much smaller one. So perhaps with a greater volume of food available in a purchased item, you'll just sit there and eat it. And of course, then you get in a spiral of blood sugar spikes and that leads to more eating when the spike drops. People's perception of what a normal serving should be is now distorted.

Anyhow, I look at serving sizes and all that, and sometimes I'm shocked at the amount of food people can and will eat in one sitting. I think people believe they need more food than they really do. My husband and I started splitting meals when we occasionally eat out. We found we are more than satisfied with the smaller amount of food each, and the bonus is it's cheaper to eat out that way!

It's true. These sections used to have other things in it, but now the whole side is packed all the way down, plus endcaps throughout the store. Plus, sections. The organic/gf area, the basic vs. flavored fried tortilla chips, and now "vegetables" as a base. Though by now, of course, none of it is FOOD.

Though I have noticed they aren't as big on the athletes on the boxes and the NEW cereals based on cartoon characters have slacked off. It's old faves with new flavors instead. Perhaps we successfully closed off that particular TV/cereal/overweight cycle. Looking back, the fact I couldn't stop eating cereal did get me off cereal, once I connected the dots.

Which is why they "flood the zone with BS" and lure people into thinking this stuff is food. That's the essential disconnection we are dealing with, and no one will say so.



As a population, we have lost sight of what is food and how it works. I never watched the shows with very overweight people, but some health channels react to them as examples of what not to do, of course. They are completely trapped in craving the wrong food and eating too much of it, even though an hour later they are wailing they aren't "full" anymore.

I'm not making fun of them, because it's true. One can see how the food addiction and their own disordered emotions from malnutrition combine to make them miserable and helpless. I remember those days. Not going back.

It gives me a better sense of how these people were led astray by marketing. So they are constantly going over a line they don't know should be there.

And why doctors assume all middle-aged people are fat and sick. By the time we get there, we are.

Because everyone knows drugs and drug dealers are bad for you. But those great folks at Kellogg's! Now there's a friend. They have been told that their whole lives by now...

And yet, when they say something about my transformation over the 20 years I've lived here, (it's a small town, it's all we do ) I try to tell them how much better I look and feel... and they think the cost is too high.

Can we call it a processed-food addiction now?

The above was a long way of saying they have been blaming "our genetics" for things as a result of gone-wrong cancer research. They got a new toy and they need to know what it does. No problem there.

But something as obviously important was still led astray, from human biases and the ways money gets spent on health. In all the wrong ways.



At a time when endocrinologists have been channeled into something more akin to an app which won't recognize how sick we are.

From the numbers, genetics is meaningless. Not when half the senior population "must have the gene" because they aren't healthy.